By Kavita Mistry 
This wedding season and Pride Month, we bring you When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris, an emotional contemporary story of marriage, queer identity, and childhood trauma. We also review The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, a reflective memoir about self-love, pleasure, and nurturing an artistic life that recounts a year-long experiment with celibacy.
We cover several additional titles in this issue that significantly feature love or longing, accompanied by literary “beyond the book” articles. In conjunction with Fredrik Backman’s new release My Friends, a tale of teen friendship, we explore the work of poet Mary Oliver and her famous “The Summer Day.” We examine the tradition of queer Irish writing around Open, Heaven, Seán Hewitt’s quiet and intense debut of adolescent infatuation. Our coverage of Emily Henry’s genre-mixing romance Great Big Beautiful Life includes a look at other romance novels with complex themes. And alongside The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel, a collection of slice-of-life stories that exhibit a sense of displacement and yearning, we consider the larger landscape of contemporary Mexican literature in translation.
Meanwhile, history lovers will be riveted by America, América, Greg Grandin’s account of the relationship between Latin America and the United States, as well as Thomas Levenson’s So Very Small, encompassing humans’ efforts to fight infectious disease in the past and present.
Plus, check out other articles and reviews, previews of books publishing soon, June Books We’re Excited About, and much more.
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— The BookBrowse Team